Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Reginald McKenna,
the man who introduced the infamous “Cat and Mouse Act”, was Home Secretary
from 1911 to 1915. Born into a Catholic family in London, he later converted to
Protestantism. He studied at Cambridge University, in 1887 became a barrister,
and in 1895 he was elected Liberal MP for North Monmouthshire.

McKenna
was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in 1908, and from there moved to take
up the post of Home Secretary. The appointment pitched him into the forefront
of the Liberal government’s battle with the militant suffragettes. Over the
next few years he was engaged in a rancorous struggle with them for the moral
high ground, a struggle which already seemed lost when he took up the post.

The appointment pitched him into
the forefront of the Liberal government’s battle with the militant
suffragettes. Over the next few years he was engaged in a rancorous struggle
with them for the moral high ground, a struggle which already seemed lost when
he took up the post.

In
1909 imprisoned suffragettes had started using the hunger strike as a protest against
the government’s refusal to grant them political prisoner status. When their
refusal to eat threatened to put their lives in danger, prison authorities had
no choice but to release them onmedical
grounds. This meant that the women were effectively evading their prison
sentences. In an effort to put a stop to this, McKenna’s predecessor, Herbert
Gladstone, introduced forcible feeding. But the sheer brutality of the
treatment meted out to women during what was disguised as a medical procedure only
seemed to increase their defiance – and brought down a barrage of criticism on
the government.

Worse
still, forcible feeding didn’t work. The women persisted in their hunger strike
in spite of it and, as before, as their health failed they had to be released. Caught
between the risk of creating martyrs and letting convicted criminals go free, McKenna
sought an extension of his powers. Hitherto his only option had been to release
the prisoners with a pardon. What he needed was a mechanism for releasing prisoners
without pardoning them. He obtained that under the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge
for Ill Health) Act 1913 (the Cat and Mouse Act). Under the Act, hunger striking
women could be released on licence to recover from their ordeal, then
readmitted to prison to continue serving their sentences.

It
was a neat solution to the Home Secretary’s dilemma, as he told the House of
Commons in July 1913: “When we
are confronted with the situation in which these women refuse to take their
food, we have now power which we had not got before to liberate them in order
to prevent them committing suicide, and yet, while we liberate them, we still retain
power to enforce the law and to compel them to serve the sentence imposed upon
them by the Courts.”[1]

But
as far as his critics were concerned, the Cat and Mouse Act was a cruel refinement
of the torture of forcible feeding – especially since McKenna had not
relinquished the right to order forcible feeding on hunger striking prisoners.
In vain he protested that all the women had to do was eat. The opposition countered: all the government has to do is grant the women what they asked for – political
prisoner status.

A contemporary postcard labels McKenna: "Reggie the Mouser"

A
committee to campaign for the repeal of the Act was established. Their attempt to
deliver a petition to the House of Commons ended in exactly the same way as
previous attempts to deliver suffrage petitions, with arrests and imprisonments.
Mrs Emmeline Pethick Lawrence, former treasurer of the WSPU, and the writer Evelyn
Sharp were amongst the women who went to prison, where they went on hunger
strike.

McKenna
was vilified as a coward and a torturer of women. The militant Mary Richardson,
speaking in court after her arrest for slashing The Rokeby Venus, a painting by
Velasquez in the National Gallery, declared,
“Mr McKenna has made the criminal code into a comic valentine...I have great
contempt for any Administration which does not treat all persons equally. Mr
McKenna has not rearrested me under the “Cat and Mouse” Act, as he has done
other women, presumably because he is afraid of killing me in the forcible feeding
torture. But I am not afraid of dying. Therefore he is the greater coward. He
cannot coerce me, he can’t make me serve my sentence, he can only again repeat
the farce of releasing me or else kill me. Either way, mine is the victory.”[2]

Labour
leader Keir Hardie and other MPs raised awkward questions in the House of
Commons. They demanded to know by what right police entered private houses to
arrest women subject to the Cat and Mouse Act. They also condemned the unnecessary
violence with which the arrests were carried out. Others criticised the cost of
policing the scheme.

And
critics pointed out that the Cat and Mouse Act had failed: suffragettes were
still not serving their prison sentences. Many of the women released on licence
went on the run, and added insult to injury by continuing to carry out militant
acts. Inevitably, McKenna himself was a target for militancy. He was accosted
by suffragette Helen Cragg in Llandaff on 28 June 1912; she accused him of
“jaunting about the country while women were starving in prison”.In October 1913 his brother’s house in
Hampshire was targetted by arsonists.

McKenna
lost his seat in the 1918 general election. He became chairman of Midland Bank,
and an expert on financial matters who was consulted by Bonar Law’s
Conservative government in the 1920s. He took the lease of Mells Park, in
Somerset, and commissioned Sir Edwin Lutyens, who had built a house for him in
Smith Street, London, to rebuild the house, which had been damaged by fire in
1917. Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll designed the gardens.

Lutyens’s
work is to be found all around the village of Mells: he designed the avenue of clipped
yews at St Andrew’s Church, as well as the war memorial and other structures. Reginald
McKenna died in London on 6 September 1943, and was buried in St Andrews
Church, which is also the resting place of the poet Siegfried Sassoon. McKenna’s
tomb was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens.

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About Me

I live in Bristol and I write historical fiction and non-fiction. In 2006 I completed an MA in English Literature with the Open University, specialising in eighteenth century literature.
My historical novels are set in the eighteenth century. To date they are: To The Fair Land (2012); and the Dan Foster Mystery Series comprising Bloodie Bones (2015), The Fatal Coin (2017) and The Butcher’s Block (2017). Bloodie Bones was a winner of the Historical Novel Society Indie Award 2016 and a semi-finalist for the M M Bennetts Historical Fiction Award 2016.
The Bristol Suffragettes (non-fiction), a history of the suffragette campaign in Bristol and the south west which includes a fold-out map and walk, was published in 2013.